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Rallies Set Across Nation to Protest Big Insurance |
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Health care activists around the nation tomorrow will tell the huge private health insurance companies that are spending millions of dollars to derail health care reform:
“Big Insurance: We’re sick of it!”
In Philadelphia, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker will lead a rally and march from the steps of City Hall to CIGNA’s world headquarters to call on their executives to stop standing in the way of quality affordable health care for all.
Says Holt Baker:
Here’s the way we in labor see things—America is in a big fight over health care. The American people are on one side. Big Insurance is on the other side. Only one of us will win. We know if the insurance companies win, we all lose.
Other demonstrations are planned at the headquarters and local offices of Aetna, UnitedHealthcare and Wellpoint—including its subsidiary Blue Cross Blue Shield.
Check out our friends at Health Care for America Now (HCAN) to find an event near you. HCAN, the AFL-CIO, the Health Care for America Education Fund (HCAEF) and MoveOn are among the National Day of Action sponsors of events with the theme “Big Insurance: Sick of it!”
According to HCAN, the Big Insurance companies are spending $1.4 million a day
to oppose reform because they profit by keeping the system as it is, by denying claims, raising premiums, co-pays and deductibles at will, making health care decisions instead of our doctors, denying care because of pre-existing conditions.
As the private health insurance industry focuses on blocking affordable health care for everybody, people who aren’t covered and can’t get decent health care are dying—one every 12 minutes.
A Harvard University study released last week found that some 45,000 people a year in the United States die because they don’t have health insurance and access to good care. After factoring in education and income, smoking, drinking and obesity, researchers found that the uninsured had about a 40 percent higher risk of death, linking 45,000 American deaths a year to lack of insurance. In 1993, it was 25 percent.
Without proper care, uninsured people are more likely to die from complications from preventable and treatable diseases such as high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease.
One of the study’s authors, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, told CBS News:
We have lots of good treatments for high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol that can now prevent complications, that can now lengthen our patients’ lives—but we can’t do anything for our patients if they can’t afford to come to our offices.
Woolhandler also said that in cities around the country, many clinics and public hospitals that offer low-cost health care are closing their doors.
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September 30, 2009 Demonstrations Supporting the Mad As Hell Doctors’ Arrival/Event in DC
HEALTH CARE RALLY on SEPT 30 from 6-8pm at the northwest corner of the intersection of HOLLYWOOD and HIGHLAND
Let’s launch the White Ribbon as a national symbol for the Single Payer Movement. Tie a white ribbon somewhere in your local community!! Do it today! Please join us and people around the country as we rally in support of a Single Payer plan in our own cities. We will be passing out white ribbons to the press, to pedestrians and drivers-by, just as the Mad As Hell Doctors will be doing upon their arrival in DC on the same day, asking for an audience with the President to promote an American Single Payer Plan.
Medical professionals and students, politicians, celebrities, entertainers and citizens, please contact Teri or Kristin if you would like to offer testimonials and/or express your outrage at a corrupted health care system that puts profit before people.
Our message to the President and Congress is clear: The National Universal Health Plan, HR676, is the Solution. We Demand it Now. The “Public Option” is token, the mandate, a trap. It does nothing to make US business more competitive against an international manufacturing base not burden by such mandate. We refuse to see our jobs disappear, our health deteriorate, our personal and collective future in peril just to protect the middle-man. What we need is real reform that finds immediate savings, controls costs, and accomplishes the moral imperative of true Universal Access. A single-payer plan is the only real path to an American Health Care System that is socially, ethically and fiscally responsible. The president says his most important job is keeping us safe, many more of us will die at the hands of our present system than at the hands of terrorists.
REAL CHANGE NOW
GET MAD - STAY MAD! EVERYBODY IN - NOBODY OUT! TIE ONE ON FOR SINGLE PAYER!
In support of: http://www.madashelldoctors.com
RSVP
Teri Szucs march4healthcare.la@gmail.com 213-251-3291
Kristin Dewey mikessister@gmail.com 626-375-8753
We need a single payer system so our brothers & sisters nationwide
don’t have to worry about getting proper health care because their not insured, or are under insured. It is senseless for that over 40,000 people are dying every year because some fat cat in Washington D.C. is getting over 3 million dollars in campaign contributions to make sure it continues to happen. We need adequate health care now; it is a human right, not a privilege! How is it, that we provide the equivalent of socialized medicine to most of those pundits at the Capitol who also deny us the right to adequate health care with the help of their insurance brethren?
It’s time for President Obama to get off the fence and work to fulfill his campaign promise to advocate the single payer system,
which is one of the main reasons the majority of the people fought to get him elected. The Senator Baucus appointment to head the committee for health care reform was a slap in the face to all U.S. Americans; the President must do something to seriously help the poor working families all across this country, after having had to put up with JR for the last 8 years because of fraudulent elections. Something must be done if we’re ever going to recover from the mess he left us in, & nothing’s going to get done, if insurance companies continue to be allowed to bribe our politicians with campaign contributions, and they must be stopped.
We all witnessed the tea party protests in Washington, D.C. in defense of the status quo and to counter that, my suggestion is for all uninsured or under insured to make a trip to Pittsburgh where the G-20 Summit is being held. Once there hold up signs directed at other countries attending who have healthcare for all stating: “Medical Refugee” or “Can I come home with you?” According to the WHO we are 37th when it comes to healthcare availability. I also love the tying of the white ribbon idea posted previously.
Mary MacElveen
http://www.mary-macelveen.blogspot.com
How are Middle Americans supposed to get a fair shake when Congress and Senators are paid off by insurance companies? I listen to the news everyday and I get more pessimistic as each day passes. We have Baucus presenting a bill and he received 3.7 million from insurance companies. I want a public option or single payer–dont care which, but it sounds like it wont happen for either. I wish there was something I could do, but too no avail. My represenatatives do not want hcr and will not even discuss it. I is all very hopeless.
The AFL-CIO needs to break from the Democratic Party and builds a workers’ party, a labor party for ordinary working people not multi-millionaires. The AFL-CIO also needs to revert to the militant organizing tactics, at the grassroots and with the democratic participation of the rank and file, that won the great strikes of the 1930s like the great Minneapolis Teamsters Strike, Autolite, and the SF Dockworkers Strike all in 1934 and the great CIO GM Sit-Down Strikes of 1937 that gave such huge power and pride to the whole labor movement and made such an enormous difference in the lives of millions of working men and women and their families. It does little good to rattle the saber from the podium and then go hat-in-hand to the Democratic Party bosses begging them not to sell us out to their bosses on Wall Street. We need a Workers Party, with a democratic party platform put together by the rank and file, with all its representatives accountable and recallable by democratic will of the rank and file. We need all union officers and officials, including those at the top of the AFL-CIO (and Change To Win) to be paid at the prevailing wage of the workers they represent. We need elected committees of the rank and file to democratically oversee spending at the top. We need a pooled-fare policy to enable rank and file delegates to attend all union conventions and some day all Workers Party conventions. We need to kick out appeasers of the Democratic Party tops and build our own party and our own political leadership from the ranks, in action, unity and solidarity. Then - and only then, in my opinion - will we realize our demands for justice for the working man and woman in this country and really come to the aid of working people throughout the world as they too fight for justice.
lstl4 : WE need the single payer plan, it eliminates the insurance companies’ profit over patient care machine. With the AFL-CIO recent endorsement of single payer (HR 676), after over 500 unions all across America have laready done, it is time for Pres. Trumka to push for single payer and end the greedy profit making way of health care. WE want health care, not health insurance!
Nice! Rallies! Nice again! But keep WHERE a secret!
Gotta agree with John G who out there failed the OI? Where When that comes FREAKING FIRST SO WE KNOW WHAT TO DO GET BACK IN THE FIELD OH BLOG PERSON!!!!!
Now you have three hours where are the rallies places and times?